This is a love letter to Lester, who lived the dream of
the American cowboy president:
Who "confounds the designs of evil men."
Who created soaring hymns to the mecca of culture.
Who described the prisons and passions of something so
transcendent it seemed impossible to pin down.
Who was brave enough to scale the walls of a cathedral
built "for a woman in hell."
Who always knew what was truly sacred.
This is a love letter to Lester, whose words could fly
faster than methadrine through veins, than firing
synapses:
Whose words took flight before his own eyes.
This is a love letter to Lester, whose relationship to
music was so throw-down-and-fuck-me painful that he
couldn't bear to see it fail him.
This is a letter to Lester, who hated something, then fell
in love with it irrevocably, and never looked back.
This is a love letter to Lester for his poetic,
masochistic spontaneity.
This is a love letter to Lester, who could write about
culture in a way that creates myth and captures legends.
This is a love letter to the interplay of art, drugs,
desperation and sheer beauty that built New York City.
This is a love letter to Lester, whose wisdom washes up at
our ankles.
This is a love letter to complication and confusion,
and the cruelty of irony.
This is a love letter to the beauty in the dark.
This is a love letter to you, Lester Bangs. But what's the
point of writing it?
Unlike the sheaves of paper that fell from your cloud, it
will never be beautiful enough to do justice to the thing
it describes.

"You know your hatred is just like anybody
else's. The real question is what to live for.
And I can't answer it. Except another one of your
records. And another chance for me to write. Art
for art's sake, corny as that. And I bet Andy
believes it too. Otherwise he woulda killed
himself a long time ago."
-Lester Bangs, Untitled Notes on Lou Reed, 1980